Masculinities at Play

The basketball court is a readily available and socially accepted space to play with local notions of masculinity. The dominant form of masculinity, called hegemonic masculinity, is white, middle/upper class and heterosexual. However masculine ideals are remade and reworked on the Notre Dame campus, particularly through basketball. Judith Butler posits that gender is something that is performed, it is not just something that one "has" rather what one "does." For Butler, the subject is constituted in and through the repetitive performance of gendered acts. Keeping this in mind, I will examine how the pickup basketball game is one such activity in which masculine gender is performed. However, masculinity is not a "monolithic construct" (Cameron 334). There are multiple ways to assert masculinity. This is why when the young men play basketball they are not just playing basketball, they are playing with masculinity.

The display of the male body is an important way in which the participants assert hegemonic masculinity. One informant remarked to me, "my grad student friends are ashamed of coming to play because they are pretty good but they don't want to end up on the skins team." This display is thus evidenced in the practice of "shirts versus skins." In order to differentiate the players of the different teams, members of one team take their shirt off while those of another team leave their shirt on. This practice could be seen as a symbolic display of the masculine body. A woman can never be a skin, so by being a skin, the player distances himself from femininity. Furthermore, when the physique of an individual is closely aligned with the cultural ideals of the masculine body, a player maximizes his performance of hegemonic masculinity. When I asked an informant why players take their shirt off, the first thing he said was "to show off their bods [sic]." Thus, even when a player is not engaged in competitive play, he may still leave his shirt off.

The space of the gymnasium, particularly at Rolfs, reinforces the notion of masculinity as a performance. The basketball courts are central in the architecture of the gym. The three tiers of the building buffer the space, and the top tier, which is a track, surrounds it completely. From virtually any public space in the gym, one is positioned to view the pickup basketball games. Even the treadmills face out towards windows that overlook the court. Thus, the display of the male body and its athletic performance is gazed at by not just fellow players, it is to be seen by almost everyone at the gym. Thus even the spatial positioning of the courts draws attention to the players and what they are doing.

Messner noted that men from lower classes, sport is one of few avenues through which to gain "respect," which he defines as "the masculine quest for recognition through public achievement," because of "structural constraints due to class and race inequalities" (Messner 2007: 56) . For men of lower classes, sports are emphasized because it is an available arena to gain the symbolic capital associated with this respect and masculinity. Although the young men at Notre Dame come from a variety of ethnic and class backgrounds, they on the other hand have myriad recourses and manners to achieve "recognition through public achievement," particularly academic achievement. In fact, for my informants, recognition from academic or professional achievements are possibly more valued than the potential recognition available on the basketball court. Any student at the University, regardless of socio-economic background, has potential to accumulate the symbolic and cultural capital available through higher education that typically excludes people from lower classes.

The pickup basketball court is not the only space in which young men are agents of their own masculinity. In fact, in this particular context, the space is not even be perceived as a central arena for this activity. One informant asked me, "Why are you doing your project on basketball [here]? You should have done it at Bengal Bouts [a boxing activity]." From the emic standpoint, the pickup basketball game is not related to displays of masculinity. It is seen as a quotidian activity seen as a way "to de-stress" or "blow off steam." Yet, from an etic standpoint, it is precisely this daily nature that makes it an important, albeit implicit, space for the performance of masculinity. It is a space set apart from "ordinary or real life" (Huizinga 1949: 8) that the players have the opportunity to experiment with versions of masculinity. Its repetitive nature, in that the students go play week after week, makes these experimentations natural and acceptable.